


Just to Have You Once Again

by fairmanor



Series: My Two Boys [4]
Category: Schitt's Creek
Genre: (but make it wholesome), 1970s to Present Day, Disaster Bi Clint Brewer, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Enemies to Lovers, F/M, Falling In Love, Fluff, High School, Light Angst, M/M, Nurse Marcy, Origin Story, POV Clint Brewer, Prom, Reunion, Slow Burn, time apart
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-03
Updated: 2021-02-03
Packaged: 2021-03-15 05:48:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,765
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29184279
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fairmanor/pseuds/fairmanor
Summary: Marcy and Clint's love story, as interpreted by me.Title is from iconic 70s love song "Everything I Own" by Bread.
Relationships: Clint Brewer/Marcy Brewer, Patrick Brewer/David Rose
Series: My Two Boys [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2079489
Comments: 27
Kudos: 60





	Just to Have You Once Again

**Author's Note:**

> **Just to clear up some confusion:** A couple of people were asking about the whole "student nurse" thing that Marcy is doing in the fic. I've since realised that it's not a North American thing! When I was in school I was used to seeing kids as medical assistants or cadets getting first aid/paramedic training and just walking around in their uniforms, but apparently that's not the norm. Oh well, you can humour me by suspending your disbelief for now. 🤣
> 
> As usual, instead of working on my WIPs and doing my actual life things, I decided to dedicate my afternoon to the cutest parents of all time. I love them so much. Please assume that at any given moment I am thinking about Clint and Marcy Brewer.
> 
> If you haven't read the other bits of the My Two Boys series, I would recommend it as there are some parts of this fic that reference it, e.g. where Clint grew up, Marcy being a psychiatric nurse, Clint's bisexuality (even if he didn't know it at the time).

_December 14th, 1976_

Clint is used to people being there when he wakes up.

Back when he and his twin brother were kids, they used to share a nursery in the tall-roofed upstairs rooms of their big house, telling each other ghost stories until the sun came up. Every time he was sick, his mother would stay with him until her eyes were lidded and her hair was strewn, checking his temperature more than was necessary. And he knows he’ll always look back fondly at he and his father’s camping trips to the old hunting lodge out east that’s been in their family for decades.

That’s why, when he comes to under the grimy, yellowed lights of the school infirmary, he’s not at all surprised to see someone’s blurry figure standing over him, bent-headed and fussing with bandages on Clint’s thigh.

Wait, why are there bandages on his thigh?

Clint murmurs it, quiet and slurred, and reaches down to pat at the wad of starched fabric and dull pain. The person tuts and slaps his hand away.

“Hold still,” they mutter. “I’ve never done this before and you’re not making it any easier.”

Finally, he starts to blink away the brilliance of the light and looks up. There’s a girl in a pale yellow dress standing over him, all pursed lips and stiff white collars. There’s a name badge on her chest that reads MC.

Clint frowns, then winces at the pain it brings on.

“You’re not the matron,” he says.

The girl looks at him. Her eyes are ice-blue and, strangely, rather remind Clint of his own.

“Glad you noticed,” she says, moving round the opposite side of the bed to tend to his other leg – _other leg? Jeez, what kind of hit did he take?_ “Come on, roll over.”

The pain is really starting to hit him now, and this brusque treatment isn’t helping.

“Can’t.”

“Well, that’ll teach you to try and tackle Billy the Brute,” she says. There’s a hint of smugness in her voice that gets on Clint’s nerves.

“Can you stop making this harder, please?” he argues.

 _“I’m_ making it harder?”

“Yes!”

Almost in sync, they both scoff and turn away. The matron comes round to check on the student nurses and MC takes that as her cue to busy herself with the caps on the medicine bottles next to Clint’s bed, turning her back to him completely. The rest of the hockey team pile into the infirmary at that moment. Brady Phillips is at the front, concern and something else etched on his face, and Clint’s stomach does that funny flip and he forgets all about the pushy nurse as he closes his eyes again.

_January 22nd, 1977_

“You know, I think I liked you better when you were all the way out on the field.”

“Oh yeah? And why’s that?”

Clint smirks as he stretches his legs over the two rickety wooden seats in front of him, then the expression makes the nerves in his mouth twinge and he stops. He hasn’t played since his first game back after the defenseman for the Hillview Hawks had driven him into the mud. Unfortunately, as soon as Clint was back out on the field, he chipped one of his teeth so badly that he’s had to miss five games.

Luckily for him, that means he gets to spend his time watching the game and annoying this teacher’s pet of a student nurse, always perched and waiting diligently in the stands.

“Because it means you’ll be far, far away from me,” MC snaps.

Clint smiles wide, and it hurts his mouth again but he doesn’t care.

“What’s your name anyway, MC? Getting sick of calling you MC, if I’m honest.”

She scoffs, readjusting the tin first aid kit on her lap and brushing some of the rain off the cross on the front. “You should _know_ my name. We’ve been in classes together before.”

“Have we? I didn’t notice,” Clint says nonchalantly.

It’s a lie. He has noticed. It was hard not to, when her hand was flying up to answer every five minutes. She talked so often that the teachers didn’t even say her name anymore. He’s been desperate to know it for much longer than five games.

“Marcy,” she says.

Clint stares at her. She looks like a Marcy. Her hair comes just below her ears, mousy brown and pin-straight. It frames soft, rosy skin and a round face. He imagines what she might look like when she’s smiling. Really smiling, not just the sardonic smirks she sometimes throws his way to shut him up. He’s seen the smile from afar, arm in arm with her friends as they walk across the football pitch. It’s a bright thing that scrunches up her eyes and hides in the crooks of her cheeks. He’s only ever chosen to annoy her since they met. He’s starting to regret that now.

Still, old habits die hard.

“Marcy, MC, Marcy, MC. Basically the same thing.”

“No they’re not.”

“They are. What’s your last name?”

“What’s it to you?” she retorts.

“I’m curious!” he huffs, pulling his legs in to seat them on the wet, muddy boards of the bleachers. “Fine, I’ll stick to calling you MC. MC. Sounds like _Emcee_. Hey, did you ever see Cabaret at the movies?”

“Ugh, go _away,_ Clint!”

_March 7th, 1977_

The thing about Clint is that he has a brain wired to the fundamental. Right and wrong, this and that, yes and no. It means that he’s perhaps not the best player on the team. He sees a goal opening or someone to defend and he charges without looking twice.

What this means is that he’s also completely and utterly accident-prone.

It means that in the mere ten weeks of games in the spring semester, Clint sees his way through two cracked toes, a black eye, a twisted ankle and another clunk to the head that sees him once more regaining consciousness in the infirmary.

This time, Marcy’s already talking when he wakes up.

“…yet again,” she saying, but Clint’s too groggy to tune in right now. “The last bell rang an hour ago. Why, oh _why_ do you have to make everything harder?”

“Who, me?” Clint mumbles.

“Yes, you!” she says, throwing her hands up. “Nurse Lake is making me stay late to tend to you because I’m the oldest. I had a date with Jerry Peters tonight and you’ve gone and spoiled it.”

Even in his dizzy state, Clint can’t help but snort. “Jerry Peters? The Jerry Peters who always reminds the teachers we had homework?”

Clint already hated Jerry. He was a snobby drip of a boy who would always make disparaging comments about the collective intellect of “the jocks”, as he called Clint and his friends. He hates him even more now, for taking Marcy away from – no, not that. For making Marcy annoyed at him? Maybe. Or maybe it was just because Clint hated him more every time his name was said. Yes, that had to be it.

“Yes, that Jerry. And now I’ve stood him up without meaning to.”

“Good,” he snaps. When it came to relationships, his father had always told him that one date could change your life. But now Marcy was here, getting annoyed at him instead of getting her hand kissed by Jerry’s spitty, brace-filled lips. He couldn’t help thinking he’d saved her from a miserable fate.

Marcy just glowers at him and picks up the biggest bottle of medicine. It’s also the most disgusting one. It comes in a thick black glass that would rival an old Coke bottle, and the goopy stuff inside is like bitter molasses.

“This is why you don’t get on the wrong side of me,” Marcy says primly. “I know you hate the taste of this one. It’s also the one you need right now, so open up.”

“MC, no.”

But Marcy’s already filling the tablespoon up. There’s a smile on her face that looks like the closest thing she’s ever got to happiness in his vicinity. Clint sighs heavily and opens his mouth.

“Marcy, please – mmph!”

As always, it’s disgusting. He wishes he could give it to himself and regulate the amount, but…to be honest, he kind of likes this. Barbs and rivalry aside, Marcy is a natural born caretaker. He’s trying not to let himself think about it too much, though. He’s definitely _not_ thinking about the kind of mother she might be one day. No, that would be preposterous.

Marcy gives him a self-satisfied look and sits down on the stool beside his bed.

“Maybe one day you’ll get so tired of the medicine that you’ll stop getting yourself injured altogether,” she says, and there’s something behind it that Clint can’t quite place. It’s almost hopeful, and Clint isn’t quite sure how to take that. She either doesn’t want him to get hurt for his own sake, or she really does dislike his company. Either way, he’s got her attention. And that’s good enough for now.

He looks at her for a second. He makes the most of every moment he can that she’s not scowling.

“Sorry about your date,” he says, only half-meaning it for the sake of her potential disappointment.

“Oh, it’s fine,” she mutters. “I think I was just bored anyway.”

Clint tries not to make his sigh of relief too obvious.

“Jerry Peters? Really?”

Marcy chuckles, and the sides of her bright blue eyes crinkle up. It’s the smile he’s been dying to see close up for months, where the corners tuck themselves into her plump cheeks. He laughs with her, and throws in a few impressions of Jerry to make her laugh harder.

“We’re still not done here,” Marcy says, standing up. “You haven’t had your cod liver oil yet.”

Clint’s stomach sinks. He gets a flashback of his childhood nanny cornering him in the kitchen with a huge spoon of the stuff.

“No. I don’t need that. You _know_ I don’t need that.”

“Oh, I know,” Marcy says, a wicked glint in her eye. “Come on, it’s good for your bones. If you insist on getting battered up then I insist on making you pay for it, rich kid.”

Clint puts up a fight against the oil, but in the end his subconscious wins out and he lets her do it just to feel her hair ghosting over his shoulder and the press of her fingertips on his upper arm as she steadies the spoon towards his mouth.

He grimaces and wipes his lips. He’ll need a drink to clear the horrible taste from his mouth, but right now he feels better than he thought he would.

“You’re good at this,” he says without thinking.

“At what?”

“The whole…nursey thing.”

“The ‘nursey thing’,” she repeats, mocking. Then she smiles again. “I enjoy it. The past few months have been good.”

“You’re gonna be a nurse when we graduate?”

“Already got my place,” she says easily, shoving the rubber stoppers back in the medicine bottles and putting them back in the drawer. “I’m going to Queen’s.”

Clint racks his brain to try and remember where that is. It’s not coming to him right now, so he just settles back onto the pillows.

“You haven’t had enough of patching people up yet?”

“It’s actually a psychiatry course,” she says. “For mental health.”

“Oh, okay.”

Clint can so easily see Marcy doing what she’s doing now well into her adulthood, but now that’s she’s said it aloud psychiatric nursing seems to fit her just as well. Maybe it’s just the association of care that he has developed over the past few months, but there’s something about her that calms him down.

They fall into a pleasant silence after that, Marcy sitting by him and fiddling with the edge of his blanket. They catch each other’s eye and Marcy gives him the warmest smile yet. It hits Clint right in the sternum like a well-timed cup of cocoa.

_May 30th, 1977_

That Clint went to Whiteoak High School at all was a miracle he thought he’d never achieve. He begged his father not to send him to boarding school like his brothers, choosing instead to stay at home and see how slowly he could grow up. The school was on the other side of his native Shaughnessy, so while he was there he always had his back to the big houses and the country club that he’d started to resent a little bit.

It wasn’t always the best decision. Being home meant that his father would sometimes try and take him along to observe a day of work at his tech company, as though to show Clint everything he’d have one day. Clint was just happy throwing paper airplanes in class and looking through the big telescope on the balcony at night. Doing the things he liked and wanted to do.

He knew he liked manual jobs. He considered getting an apprenticeship after graduation in welding or plumbing, but he was too tall for some of the narrow spaces he’d need to squeeze himself into and one of his many hockey mishaps had given him a permanent stiff wrist. As he did with many things, he put off the thought of graduation until it was nearly upon him.

The only time he ever regretted his decision not to apply for university was when Brady Phillips graduated early to study statistics in Ottawa. He was Clint’s best friend on the hockey team, and when he left it had brought Clint closer to tears than he had been in years.

He stumbles his way through the rest of the semester until finally, blessedly, his exams are over. All that’s left is prom and the promise of a summer filled with drive-in movies and drinking in the park. By the time the former comes around, it takes Clint all to tying his tie before he realises he never actually asked anyone to go. He won’t be modest; he’s had more than one person ask him to go with them. He might be a pretty quiet person when he’s not messing around with his friends, but he can’t pretend he hasn’t noticed the way some of the girls whisper and giggle and push each other towards him when he’s walking down the hallway.

He doesn’t suppose he minds. There’s not really anyone he was interested in enough to go with anyway –

 _That’s a lie,_ he corrects himself when he remembers he’s alone. People catch his interest all the time. Their eyes and their laughter and their hands slapping his arms away from bandages latch on the inside of him with every breath and stick to his ribs like burrs.

He wonders if anyone asked her to go with them.

When he gets there and sees her on a chair at the edge of the decorated gym hall, swinging her feet, his heart aches. Partly because he’s worried no one brought her, and partly because he wishes he’d asked. But mostly because she’s so _beautiful._

The kinds of girls that have crushes on him, openly flirting with him in the hallway, are the ones Clint would expect to fall for. The tall, slim, long-haired cheerleaders would probably look right on his arm or seated at his long dining table. But right now, Marcy Clark might as well be the only girl in the room. She’s cut and rolled her hair so that it sits in a shiny, curly bob on the shoulders of her lacy, coral pink dress. She’s so much shorter and softer than him, and Clint just wants to scoop her up.

He crosses through the room towards her. Thankfully, she’s sitting right by the punch bowl, so he has an excuse.

“You look like you’re having a whale of a time, MC.”

Marcy looks up, her eyes raking down his outfit slowly. Clint’s glad the lighting in the gym hides his blush.

“I was until five minutes ago,” she grumbles, resting her chin on her hand. “My friends decided to bail and have their own party in the park.”

Clint pours her a glass of punch. “Why didn’t you go with them?” he says, sitting down beside her.

“They asked, but I…”

Marcy ducks her head as she takes the punch. She won’t meet his eye.

“You what?”

There’s a long pause. The first few notes of _Fernando_ are trilling over the speakers. Marcy takes a gulp of her drink and answers in a rush straight after.

“Iwaswaitingforyou.”

God, this girl. Clint feels his chest flutter in a way it hasn’t since Brady brushed a splash of cream off Clint’s cheek at their last hockey victory party in November.

“You were waiting for me?” Clint says slowly, just to double-check that that’s what she said. He also wants to see her get flustered.

“I – yes! You said you’d be here, so I just – I – yeah. Also, you’re _late._ So there.”

Marcy tries to stumble through the rest of her explanation, her face beet-red, until he relents and stands up. He holds out a hand. She looks up at him, her lips quivering into a smile.

“What, now?” she says, looking round as though one of the popular girls is going to be standing there waiting to pounce on Clint. “Don’t you – your friends, aren’t they waiting for –”

“Just get up, Marce.”

It’s not quite sweeping her off her feet, but it’s close enough. Almost better, he thinks, as he takes hold of her soft hand and spins her away from him to ABBA’s steady beat. Her eyes and the dents of her curls are catching on the glittering lights and she looks like a disco ball when she spins, bright and happy and full of life. She’s sharp and witty and their banter matches up like a jigsaw and _damnit,_ Clint just remembered she’s going to medical school.

When she comes back in from the spin, he holds her tighter.

“Remind me,” he says casually, too casually, “where is it you’re going to university?”

“Queen’s,” she says quietly.

“Oh yeah.”

“Ontario.”

Clint swallows. “Mm.”

The lights dim. Just like in the movies, the mood on the dancefloor shifts in an instant as _Everything I Own_ comes on.

_The finest years I ever knew, were all the years I had with you…_

Clint holds her tighter.

“What about you?” she says, bringing her hand up Clint’s back to rest on his shoulder.

“I’m not sure,” he says. He’s given a lot of thought recently to what he’s going to do now that he’s realised he doesn’t have to be bound by his father’s business or that he doesn’t care a lick about money. He’s still not sure what he wants at all. “Something stress-free, hopefully. I’m not one for hardy academic stuff, you know that.”

“Oh, I do,” Marcy teases.

He half-smiles, half-grimaces and jostles her from side to side. She squeals and pulls away from him and that’s not what he wanted to happen at all, so he pulls her back in.

_And I would give everything I own, just to have you back again…_

She meets his eye. Something between them feels close, and not just because they’re practically slow dancing now, her chin pressed into the crook of his collarbone. Clint reckons he might as well say it.

“I’m going to miss you.”

Marcy sighs. It’s charged and heavy and it hurts Clint’s chest.

 _“Now_ you tell me,” she says.

“Well, when else did you want me to tell you?”

“I don’t know, I just –” she sighs again. “I don’t know. Any time in the past six months would have been nice.”

Clint almost stops dancing. His hand presses tighter into the small of her back. Despite himself, he huffs out an incredulous laugh. “MC, what are you talking about?”

She stares at him intently, her eyes sad and filmed over. “When I went out to Ontario to visit the university, I really liked it. Fell in love with the whole place, if I’m honest. I think…I think I’m going to stay there. After I graduate.”

And then Clint _does_ have to stop dancing, because his heart drops into his feet and won’t pick itself up. He pulls back, but not enough to make Marcy think he’s angry or anything. He’s not angry at her, anyway. He’s angry at himself for leaving it all too late.

“So I – so you’re going, and you’ll, what, never come back?”

He knows he sounds pouty and dramatic, but he doesn’t care. He’s feeling pouty and dramatic.

Marcy shrugs. “I don’t know.”

As they dance their way through a few more songs that are much slower and more relatable than they have any right to be, they don’t say much more. They don’t have to. They both know what the deal is; they had a chance, and they missed it. Maybe Marcy assumed he was with someone. Maybe Clint really thought she hated him, at least for a while. It doesn’t matter anymore.

Someone calls to Clint from across the hall. He looks up and his friend Frank is waving a six-pack of beer above his head and gesturing towards the door.

He wishes he could stay in this moment, pressed against Marcy’s warmth, forever. But the longer he stays, the harder it’ll be to pull away.

“I think the team are gonna get out of here,” Clint says. “You’re – you’re okay here?”

He was about to invite her along, but again. It would be too hard.

“Yeah,” she lies. They look at each other again, and Marcy’s eyes fill with tears before she crushes him into a tight hug. He responds in kind, bringing his long arms tight around her shoulders and holding her there. He hopes she can’t hear his heart hammering. Then again, it doesn’t really matter anymore.

“Oh, Clint Brewer,” she whispers. It sounds almost reproachful, her voice thick and wet and full of things unsaid. “Why do you have to make everything harder?”

_October 3rd, 1982_

Clint has always liked fall better than any other season. It brings a golden-brown horizon and constant smells on the air, all cinder toffee and sausages and freshly brewed beer. He likes the feeling of coming home after a day and seeing his neighbourhood getting ready for the season with pumpkins and campfires.

It also brings his birthday. Two weeks ago, he’d woken up to find a brand-new truck in the driveway, shiny red with a big bow tied to the front. His father might not have been completely thrilled about Clint’s decision to put as much distance between himself and education as possible, but the decent man inside won out to support his son in any way he could. Clint set up a handyman business as soon as he left school, and had been doing comfortably well for himself ever since. Too well, really, since the tools he needed to carry out the jobs people were requesting had outgrown his little brown Ford.

He slams the rear tailgate closed and pulls tarp over the metal pipes in the back, taking a moment to enjoy the warmth of the lowering sun.

He likes the life he’s making for himself. He really does.

He just wishes he could work out what more he wants from it.

Because for the past five years, he’s only been content. Never less than that, but very rarely more. He sometimes thinks about what he left behind on that dance floor in the gym hall at senior prom.

No, scratch that. All the time, at any given moment, he’s trying to fight away images of Marcy that settle themselves in his mind and refuse to budge.

Marcy. His little MC. Well, she was never really his, but in hindsight he feels like they were both hurtling towards and away from each other for months. Like running up to waves on the beach and then running away again when they chase you. They had each other in some kind of hold, opposing magnets though they were. Clint wonders if that was what had prevented them from making any moves. Opposing magnets can still work well together, provided they sit side by side.

He trudges his way to the front door, despairing when he remembers that tonight’s an extended family dinner. Aunts will fuss and grandmothers will unsubtly bark about marriage. There’s so _many_ of them, clattering and talking with their mouths full and little cousins and nieces running rampant around the long table. He loves his family, he really does, but there’s this element of new money formality that comes with their big dining table and the fancy smoking jackets his uncles wear that Clint can’t keep up with. Doesn’t want to keep up with.

“What about you, Clinton?” one of his grandmothers calls, as expected. “Can we hope to see you made an honest man soon?”

Clint fixes his gaze on his cut of beef. “Not yet, gramma.”

“I’m your _grandmother,_ boy, not your gramma. Not yet? Have you just started courting?”

Beside him, Clint’s twin brother Anthony snorts into his wine.

“Courting,” he mutters. “Like we’re 18th century noblemen.”

“We are at this dinner table.”

Anthony laughs louder, earning them both a glare from their mother.

Later that night, the two of them are lounging in the drawing room sneaking whiskey and cigars. One of their dad’s old records, _Chattanooga Choo Choo,_ is crackling softly on the old turntable.

“I’m going to take a lot of this stuff with me when I finally move out,” Clint says, gesturing to the wall of books and the globe on the other side of the room. “I’ll make myself a room like this one no matter how big my house is.”

“When you move out?” Anthony says, cocking his head. He has his elbows resting on the back of the couch opposite Clint, his shoes putting dusty prints on the burgundy leather. “I thought you were getting this place.”

Clint scoffs. “Why, it’s like you don’t know me at all. I don’t think I could stay here for anything. For…”

“Unlimited money?”

“Yeah, not even that.”

“What about half the land in North America?”

“Don’t know what I’d do with it.”

“Fame?”

“Not talented enough.”

“Marcy Clark?”

“Maybe, but – hey, wait.”

Anthony points at Clint like he’s caught him out. “So you _do_ still like her!” he says triumphantly.

Clint feels his face burn up. He leans closer to his brother and stares him in the eye. “I do not.”

“You do.”

“Do not! That was years ago.”

“If it was years ago, you would’ve stared at me and said _who._ I only vaguely mentioned her name, and you said you would maybe stay in a place you hate for her.”

Clint’s face drops and he sighs, leaning back in the chair. “You win,” he gripes. “As usual.”

Anthony chuckles, hopping across the coffee table between them to sit by Clint’s side. “It’s okay, you know. You could always go and see her.”

“What, on the other side of the country? I don’t even know where she’ll be. Oh God, what if she’s married?”

“You’ll never know if you don’t give it a chance,” Anthony reasons.

“So, you’re suggesting I go all the way to Ontario after hunting down her address from someone here, then driving across the country when she could have either moved away years ago or be married?”

Anthony ponders that for a second. Then, “yeah, that’s pretty much it.”

Clint groans and puts his head in his hands. It’s so outlandish and silly and so _Clint_ that he has to catch himself for a moment and have a serious think about why he’s like this.

But he knows that Marcy is this missing piece. He knows he left school reckless and discontent and half in love with her, and that he’d do anything to get to know her properly and start over again.

After a while, Clint looks up at his brother.

“How long would it take to drive to Ontario?”

_October 14th, 1982_

They spend the next few days with the big atlas in the drawing room, mapping it out. The places he’d need to stop for gas, any relative’s houses he could stay at on the way to refresh himself, the best diners. He hasn’t been driving for long and doesn’t want to push it more than six hours a day on such unfamiliar roads, so they eventually work out that it would take just over a week to get there.

“A week?!” his father cries, when Clint finally approaches him to tell him. “You’re going to skip work to drive across the country to meet a girl from school you barely knew for a week there and back?”

“It’s just a week!” Clint argues. “Well, two weeks, but - whatever. And if it doesn’t work out or - or I don’t find what I’m looking for, it’s fine. I’ll come back and it can be like it never happened.”

Martin Brewer looks at his son for a long time. He finally sighs, reaching into the breast pocket of his tweed to pull out his wallet.

“You’ve always been unconventional in finding what you need, son, but you’ve never failed yourself so far,” he says, and Clint feels a stronger love for his father than he ever has before blaze up inside him. “If you’re sure, then…here’s money for gas. And don’t forget to drop in on your Aunt May in Calgary.”

Clint smiles and accepts the hug his dad offers, glad that he already packed his bags. He would’ve gone no matter the reaction, but it’s nice to know he doesn’t have to think about gas.

So he drives. He sings along to Queen and listens to cassette tapes of books and eats his first McDonald’s, and he drives. He has moments where he wonders if he’s an idiot, a creep, a lovesick fool, but then he’ll catch sight of a rare animal or the most beautiful sunset he’s ever seen and remind himself that if worst comes to worst, the most he got out of this was a really good road trip.

One of Marcy’s old schoolfriends June had given him the address before he left, eyeing him knowingly as he jittered nervously back to his car. It had given him hope. This whole ordeal would’ve been even more embarrassing if he’d gone all the way there to realise June’s look of pity was because Marcy was already shacked up in a white picket house. Or, even worse, if he’d had to end the trip at June’s door after she slammed it in his face.

It feels like forever, but he gets there eventually. His legs ache as he unpacks at the little hostel he booked, and he’s ready to take a nap when he remembers the address in his back pocket.

He’s less than an hour away from Marcy Clark.

He could be ten minutes away from Marcy Clark.

He checks the framed regional map on the wall of his room. Then he checks the address.

God, he _is_ ten minutes away from Marcy Clark.

He showers, brushes his teeth, changes three times, and runs.

Thankfully, this city is small and spacey and wide. He makes each turn easily, no matter how sick with nerves he’s feeling. He reaches the apartment block and takes three of the deepest breaths of his life before pressing the third buzzer down.

He waits.

And he waits.

He presses the buzzer again. And again.

Then, with a familiarity that punches the breath out of him, he hears, “I’m coming! Jeez!”

The door swings open, and there she is.

Her hair is longer than it was. She’s put it in a braid that sits neatly on her shoulder. She was always so _neat._

Her blouse is blue, with a splashing floral pattern, and she’s wearing a black pinafore skirt. Her feet are bare.

She looks impatient and incredulous. Her face is fixed in one expression, but her ice-blue eyes are darting all over and around him as though she can’t believe he’s real.

She’s as beautiful as the day he lost her.

“…Clint Brewer?”

“MC,” he says, swallowing hard. “I…hi.”

“Hi,” Marcy breathes, then squeezes her eyes shut and shakes her head. “I – what are you doing here? Do you, um…live here now? University?”

And Clint realises that in the 48 hours of driving, he didn’t think once about what he was going to say when he turned up at the door.

“I’m just…here,” he says. “I came here to see you.”

“You came here to...”

“Yeah,” he says simply. There’s nothing more to it.

Marcy is still staring at him, silent. Her face softens.

“You drove all the way across the country just to - to see _me?”_

Clint shrugs. Strangely, he feels more confident about the fact that there’s really nothing else to his explanation.

“I said I’d miss you, didn’t I?”

And then something happens that he didn’t expect. Marcy’s face crumples, and she runs forward to wrap her arms around Clint’s neck and pull him down to kiss him.

The force of it bends Clint at a 45-degree angle, so he thinks fast and scoops her up like he wanted to all those years ago. He runs a hand through her hair, holds her close, tells himself he’ll never let this go now that he has it.

They kiss on the porch for what feels like hours, ignoring the sirens and the runners and the wolf-whistles from the evening drunkards. When they finally break apart, Marcy presses her forehead to Clint’s, giggling uncontrollably.

“What are we _doing?”_ she says, and Clint can’t help but laugh too.

“I have no idea.”

“Where did that come from?”

“I don’t know.”

“What _were_ we doing? Why didn’t we do this years ago?”

“I don’t know that either,” Clint says, and Marcy buries her head in his neck.

Clint was never sure how long he was going to stay in Kingston on this trip. For a dreadful few hours on the way there, he’d managed to doom himself into thinking it was going to be ten minutes. But on the tour around Marcy’s apartment, he gets a better look at a map of the city and its outskirts and is astounded to see that they’re only two hours away from the old Brewer cabin, the one his family used to live around before his father’s company had taken off and they’d all followed him west.

“Are you busy these next few days?” Clint says, leaning against her kitchen counter with a cup of tea.

“No, why?”

The answer sends a little thrill through Clint. He knows exactly what he wants to do.

They stock up on ingredients, gas, books, and puzzles before driving out to the lodge by the eastern edge of Lake Ontario. For a week and a half, they cook together, reminisce and catch up over wine, read together on the sofa and make up for all their stupid lost time. She tells him how long she was waiting for him, how her sisters and friends used to tell her to call him up, but she was worried he wouldn’t want to hear from her. He tells her that he wouldn’t want to hear from anyone else. They’d both been waiting for each other from the moment they met, unsure how it was going to happen and forever riding on the hope that it would.

It flows so naturally, so beautifully, that Clint can’t help thinking there was no other conceivable way that things could have gone.

“Those houses are nice,” Marcy says one evening, curled up in Clint’s lap at the edge of the lake. They’ve just cooked a salmon on the little fire Marcy built and are watching the sun set.

“What, those over there?” Clint says, pointing to the solid, sturdy wood-clad things with big verandas in the distance. He’s surprised they can see them. With the terrain around here, they’d probably take about an hour to reach.

“They’re the end of a town,” he continues. “My father grew up there. A lot of my family come from round here, actually.”

Marcy hums in acknowledgement. She traces circles on the outside of his leg and he kisses her hair as the sun lowers, warming them both.

“I’ve always wanted to live in a house like that,” she says quietly.

Clint thinks so too. He thinks he’d like very much to live in a house like that with Marcy Clark. But it’s too much to say right now, so he just squeezes her arm and hopes it reminds her that he’d follow her halfway around the world if she happened to be there.

_March 19th, 2018_

“The rose beds need trimming.”

Clint looks down at his wife, her head on his shoulder, perched on the edge of the bed.

“What on earth made you think of that?”

Marcy shrugs. “I don’t know. I was looking at the flower beds outside the motel, and then _Rose,_ and…I don’t know. I’m not in my right mind.”

Clint wraps an arm around her. They sit in silence for a moment. The ceiling creaks and the clock on the bedside table ticks obnoxiously.

“It wasn’t your fault, you know,” he says. “That Patrick didn’t come to us or say anything.”

“How do you know that’s what I’m thinking?” Marcy demands.

“Because it’s _you,_ MC.”

Marcy huffs.

“Well. It’s not your fault either, you know.”

Clint sighs. Five minutes ago, David and his father had clicked shut the rickety door of the motel room and left him and Marcy less confused, but no less emotional, than before.

“I just wanted to be there for him,” Clint says in a small voice. Marcy tuts and pulls herself up to face him.

“You _were,”_ she says. “And you still can be. We were there for him then, and we can be there for him now. We gave him what we knew.”

Clint’s chest aches at that. He closes his eyes as he presses a kiss to his wife’s forehead.

She’s right, as she always is. Clint has spent the past forty years giving all he can to his family, both before and after Patrick arrived. The inheritance he got from his grandfather went towards Marcy’s dream house across the lake and they moved in around two years after reuniting in Kingston, after getting married at home in Vancouver. On their fifteenth anniversary, they renewed their vows in the little church in their new – and old, Clint supposes, thinking about his family’s heritage – town. Their move east had inspired something in the rest of their family, and over the next few years the the big Brewer clan began to drift east, closer and closer, coming back to their roots.

Clint’s always been glad that Patrick grew up there. He’s glad he himself got to do what he liked as well; he spent a content twenty years working for the postal service and enjoyed being known by all only in their small space. He did off jobs around town and hosted barbecues and taught his son how to check car hoods and swing a bat and tread water, filling with love and pride every time the gap-toothed, freckled boy would come and show Clint something he worked out by himself.

For a moment, he was worried Patrick navigated this one all alone. But one look at Johnny and David, solid and strong and brimming with love for Patrick, had reassured Clint that his son was safe and loved here. 

Yes, they gave him what they knew. And they’ll continue to give him what they know. And what Clint knows now will change, as he researches and asks questions and supports and celebrates this new part of his son’s life. But it will never stop being love.

“He’ll be fine, Marce,” Clint murmurs, hearing her unspoken fears about how Patrick is going to act when he sees them. Whether Patrick will vocalise some long-ago-made realisation that he can’t come to them and talk about anything. If that’s the case, then Clint vows he’ll spend the rest of his life promising his son otherwise.

“I know, I know. He always is.” Marcy laces their fingers together and kisses the back of his hand. “He’s got you for a father. And you always make everything easier.”

**Author's Note:**

> [Click here for Marcy's prom dress](http://img1.etsystatic.com/020/1/6367873/il_570xN.481398903_mr9y.jpg)
> 
> (Also unrelated side note, I got a funky new ao3 profile picture! I like it much better than the random motel shot.)


End file.
